"Victup" the 44th team to qualify for this year's MIT semi-finalist round

Tunisian “Victup” has been selected as one of the semi-finalist teams for this year’s MIT Enterprise Forum Arab Start-Up Competition for the Ideas' Track.

A series of mobile-based applications that allow customers to check if the foodstuff meets their requirements, referring to a central database previously populated with concise information about food ingredients.

Inspiration

One of the main reasons that lie behind developing Victup is the high motivation about launching a technological Start-up that valuably brings out a valuable solution to daily problems. “This is how the concept of Victup emerged” indicated Amine Gahbiche who has been working very closely with Marouan, his current partner, for more than three years.

Amine and Marouan strongly believe that their project will contribute in increasing food consumer awareness; checking if the foodstuff meets someone’s expectation could be a complicated task. For example, when travelling outside MENA region, some persons might spend a long time to verify whether the product is Halal or not.

The data is not limited to Halal criteria but it also concerns Vegetarian consumers, BIO consumers, diabetic patients, people on diets, etc.

The more informed and educated consumers are, the more food producers will consider the healthiness of foodstuff they make.

Problem and Project

To read foodstuff ingredients is not always an easy task due to small script size, usage of food additive codes, language ignorance. Victup apps intends solving all these problems.

The Victup applications offer an incentive model to encourage people contributing to data entry in addition to an intuitive user interface including product barcode scanning so the customer can easily retrieve a product.

Consequently, people will be purchasing and verifying their products easier and faster while becoming more aware about their consumptions and able to control their choices. In some way, a community of conscious customers will be built, in which ones give nutritional advices to others.

Advice for entrepreneurs

“We applied to the competition because we are simply passionate about creating start-ups and contributing to the growth of IT economy in the region” quoted Victup.

The team advises entrepreneurs to stick to their beliefs, to always fetch the opportunity to apply them, and to never surrender after failure.